Enemy Mime

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The fact that they don't talk just makes them all the scarier.
"M-m-mimes... nothing but mimes..."
—Cindy, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron

A sub-trope of Monster Clown, the enemy of the show is a dastardly white-faced, beret-wearing mute with world domination on his mind. Occasionally they are motivated by a lesser goal, but still, evil... and almost always French. A possible reason for this is that the late Marcel Marceau (the most famous mime in the world) was French.

Some Enemy Mime villains have Mime Powers, such as the ability to erect an invisible wall or conjure an unheard gale-force wind which one must walk against. Others simply use gadgets to leech the world of sound and color, and hope and fluffy things right along with it. May or may not be affected by the "silence" condition when fought against.

Played for comedy far more often than Monster Clown. If he's particularly scruffy, he probably also Looks Like Cesare. When a mime is not necessarily evil but everybody treats him or her as such, that's Everyone Hates Mimes. When he's an antagonist who simply doesn't speak, it's Silent Antagonist. Similarly, this is not related to Heroic Mime. Also not related to Enemy Mine.

Examples of Enemy Mime include:


Anime & Manga

  • Strings (merely called "the Pantomimer" in the Japanese version) in Yu-Gi-Oh!, is a rather strange example, seeming like more of a punk anarchist/goth with his shaved head, eyeshadow, and multiple piercings. Nevertheless, he is referred to as a mime in both versions, even though his only "trick" was standing still on a park bench without moving a muscle (easy to do, as Marik Brainwashed him into his minion, and seems to have destroyed his real mind in the process).
    • Standing that still is impressive in real life.
    • In the manga, it's stated that he had murdered his parents, and apparently repressed his entire mind out of guilt, so he was already mindless when Marik found him.
  • In Yakitate!! Japan, one of the final enemy bakers is a mime called Shadow. He is able to perfect mimic his boss's Kirisaki's baking techniques, which enable his bread to tie with Kazuma's bread.


Comics

  • For a brief period during the nineties, there was a gang of villainous mimes that made several appearances in the Spider-Man titles. They were defeated, at least once, when Spidey webbed several large sheets of glass into an invisible box around them. As seen here!
  • The French comic book series De Cape et de Crocs plays with this: the bad guy's foot soldiers are mute mime tribesmen from the Moon (seriously). Their abilities include swordfighting, artistic death and distracting people with the power of mime.
  • Aside from being one of the good guys, The Mime from the comic book Mister Blank fits this trope to a T.
  • There was a one-shot Batman villainness who was a mime. That's about it.
  • One of Ant's villains is Jessica Mime, who dresses like a (skanky) mime and has a sort of "mime power" in the form of gauntlets that allow her to make various shapes in the air out of Hard Light. She's an obnoxious loudmouth even by non-mime standards, though.


Fan Works


Films -- Animation

  • In Flushed Away, the French frog spy antagonists have a mime as part of their team.
  • An Anti-Hero example comes from Tangled. One of the thugs at the Snuggly Duckling, Ulf, is revealed to be into mime during the song "I've Got A Dream". His talent comes in handy when the Thugs team up to break Flynn out of prison.
  • "Bomb Voyage", a briefly-seen villain from the beginning of The Incredibles, is a French mime who uses explosives to perpetrate his crimes.


Films -- Live Action


Literature

  • In the book Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, there are monstrous mimes, near-dead white creatures who attack by throwing flesh eating, nanobot-filled pies at people. They never rest or sleep, but occasionally get stuck in invisible boxes.
  • Not quite used in the Discworld series, where mimes in Ankh-Morpork are hung upside down over scorpion pits with a sign on the wall saying "learn the words". But the whiteface, frowning clowns, the ones that never get splashed with water and are never the butt of the joke? Yeah, even other clowns, who go through life in a sort of nihilistic angst, fear them.
    • Pterry strongly hinted in The Art Of Discworld that Vetinari banned street theater because he knows something we don't. Given that the Fools' Guild (which trains clowns, jesters and mimes) is actually one of the Discworld's largest spy networks, to which jesters all over the continent feed information on their high-born employers, the Patrician probably has a darn good reason to lock mimes up.
  • Subverted in The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway where a troupe of mimes are among the good guys saving the day at the end with their mad kung fu skills
  • The short Michael Moorcock story Elric at the End of Time sees Elric desperately battling a horde of mute pierrots (French-style whiteface clowns).


Live-Action TV

  • "The Gentlemen" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer count: pale-faced, grinning, silent monstrosities. They have the sound-leeching powers mentioned above, too.
  • An episode of Highlander the Series featured an group of assassins who used pantomime as a cover. They were led by an evil Immortal called Christoph Kuyler.
  • A trio of villainous mimes are behind the murders in The Goodies episode "Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express".


Professional Wrestling

  • "The Icon" Sting played with this trope in WCW during the fall of 1996 and most of 1997, effectively creating an enormously popular new wrestling character in the process. After being framed by Hulk Hogan's New World Order, Sting announced that he was going to go into seclusion for a while until he thought of a way to clear his name. As he made this announcement, the audience could see that his "Ultimate Warrior"-style greasepaint had begun to consume his face in a bizarre and unsettling literal example of Becoming the Mask, bleaching everything but his nose, lips, and lower jaw clown-white. The following week, Sting appeared in the rafters above the arena with a completely white face, black lips, and black Gothic "crosses" over his eyes, making him look suspiciously like a mime (although Sting's portrayer, Steve Borden, would eventually admit in an interview that the makeup design was suggested to him by nWo member Scott Hall as a tribute to Brandon Lee's appearance in the movie version of The Crow). Not only that, but Sting did not speak a single word while wearing the whiteface for over a year (finally blurting out an insult to Hogan in anger after he was stripped of the WCW Championship). In the meantime, he kept showing up in the ring (sometimes via the rafters and sometimes via the crowd) with a black baseball bat, attacking the nWo or silently subjecting his former allies to a series of "loyalty tests." The whiteface, black bat, and Badass Longcoat that Sting also wore would go on to become key parts of his wrestling iconography and are still part of his signature look today (although he now speaks quite frequently, and has hardly ever been a heel since). Long story short: While Sting was never supposed to be taken as a mime, his fans took to nicknaming him things like "The Sad Mime" or "The Angry Mime."


Tabletop Games


Video Games

  • In No One Lives Forever 2, the villains include an entire gang of evil mimes armed with submachineguns. Who sing the French national anthem. You heard that right. Singing mimes.
  • Though barely seen in the movie, the videogame version of The Warriors features a street-gang consisting entirely of mimes. Known as the Hi-Hats, the only one of them that talks is their stuttering leader, who's clearly more of a Monster Clown anyway. They also use blades as their signature weapon, which—barring two appearances of firearms—are the most powerful weapons in the game.
  • The third expansion of Guild Wars features an evil mime that steals the voices of three villagers and prevents the player character from using shout buffs.
  • The Penny Arcade game Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness features mimes as enemies. And the final boss of Part One is a Mime Cthulhu.
  • The Mime, a bit player from Animaniacs, was featured as a generic enemy in the Animaniacs Game Pack. His power was to mime an invisible box every so often making him invincible while still remaining deadly.
  • In one small area in the game Shadow Madness, mimes are Random Encounters.
    • "They sully the park with their presence!"
  • In Batman for the Sega Genesis, there's an entire level filled with mimes. The small mime enemy attacks with jump kicks while the fat mime breathes fire.
  • In the third mission of the Saints Row 2 DLC Pack "Corporate Warfare", after you kill a Mime (which gratitously explodes when you kill him), a limousine appears with an army of angry mimes bent on revenge.
  • Pokémon: Mr. Mime and and its previous form Mime Jr.
  • In the original The Sims game, a mime would sometimes show up if your party was going badly and make matters worse by annoying your guests.
  • In the third Kyrandia game, there is a mime performing in the middle of town. If you mock him too many times, the mime will kill you.

Malcolm: I see. You're going to shoot me with an arrow. Let it loose, paste-face!

  • Famed Mimic Gogo from Final Fantasy V, a boss who guards a Crystal shard in the sunken Walse Tower in the Merged World. An incredibly difficult boss unless you know the "trick" to beating him (which is to do absolutely nothing until he goes away), defeating him unlocks the Mime job class.

Web Comics

  • In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, the eponymous hero fights a battle (or two) against fast-food pitch-clown Donald McBonald, who has access to mime powers. The good doctor defeats him with a pantomime of an invisible rocket launcher. (In this story.)
  • Casey and Andy features a Mime Assassin as a recurring antagonist. He utilizes Mime Powers in addition to ordinary and specialized firearms (such as a water-gun loaded with Very Holy Water for fighting off Satan, who just happens to be dating one of the main characters), but is foiled when the Quantum Cop turns said powers against him, locking him in an invisible, unbreakable box.
  • Living with Shine [dead link] has one. He actually has powers... mime powers. (Can create invisible walls) but most of the time he is treated as joke by the cast. Also, he speaks...
  • A now defunct webcomic featured a villain with battle mimes as henchmen. When a character commented on the absurdity of this, the villain replied that, being silent, agile, and well trained, Mimes were just ninjas with pizazz.

Web Original

  • The "Panous-Panous"—Mooks in the amateur French sentai show France Five—have been described as "ninja-mimes".
  • Lord Opticord and his minions in Sockbaby have the mime theme going on, but they were most certainly not mute. Quite the contrary...

Western Animation

  • Le Mime, of Xiaolin Showdown could create invisible objects. His weakness turned out to be that said objects could be modified by others using their imaginations.
    • He also didn't know when to stop. When he started to mirror Clay's movements, Clay took advantage and punched himself in the face—Clay could take the hit, Le Mime couldn't.
  • Inverted in a Dexter's Laboratory short, wherein Dexter becomes a Monster Clown, and DeeDee dons a mime outfit to combat his evil clown-iness.
  • In an episode of The Powerpuff Girls, there is a clown who is genuinely good and just entertaining a child at his party. When he gets hit by a tidal wave of bleach, he goes crazy and turns into Mr. Mime (no relation) who tries to silence the whole town and drain its color. When the girls restore the clown back to his normal, innocent self, he's beaten to a pulp and put in jail anyway. Even the Narrator approved of this.
  • Totally Spies!! has Jazz Hands, a Mime Villain hell-bent on showing the world the beauty of his craft, usually by converting people into mimes. At first he seems to be a poor mime himself, as he never seems to shut up, but when he does buckle down he gives the heroines quite a tough time.
  • An episode of Rugrats: All Grown Up! had a Yu-Gi-Oh!-esque card game, which featured a monster called The Atomic Mime.
  • The mime Trent had to face in one episode of Total Drama Island.
  • An episode of Garfield and Friends that aired late in the series's run had Garfield, Jon, and Odie visit a carnival. A Gypsy fortune-teller at the carnival (who actually wasn't a Gypsy at all, but an Ambiguously Jewish woman) places a curse on Garfield, turning him into a werewolf. (Yes, a cat being turned into a wolf. Don't think about it too hard.) Once the curse wears off, Garfield gets his hands on the spell book and decides to teach the actress a lesson. When the actress sees which curse Garfield has selected for her, she screams "No! Not that! Anything but that!" and tries to run away. But before she can escape, Garfield recites the chant....and turns her into a mime. Some passersby show up and see the woman, scream "A mime!" and run off in terror. Garfield then turns to Jon and Odie and shrugs, saying: "There are worse things in this world than wolf-creatures, you know."
  • A Thanksgiving episode of South Park from several years back showed the kids getting ready to stage a Thanksgiving pageant starring Timmy as Helen Keller and Timmy's pet turkey, Gobbles, as Helen's pet. Cartman is in charge of writing the songs for the pageant, but he can't come up with lyrics. The play's director suggests that he put on a blindfold (in order to experience what it would have been like to be Helen Keller) and write down what he sees. Once Cartman's eyes are covered, the screen goes black and then yields to a montage of images. Most of them are "traditional" scary things, such as rotting corpses and vermin - but we also see the disturbing shot of a mime lasciviously licking his lips. What makes it truly frightening is that when Cartman takes off the blindfold and the director asks him what he has seen, his only response is "Just what I always see when I close my eyes."
  • An episode of Family Guy revealed Paris has a lot of "mime on mime violence".

Real Life

  • Heroic Inversion: Marcel Marceau, during World War II and before his miming days, was a member of the French Resistance, and later was a liaison officer with George Patton after the liberation of France.
    • Supposedly, he would defeat people by hiding behind an invisible wall, then silently returning fire.
    • And yet in Mel Brooks "Silent Movie" he was the only person who spoke aloud. First he had to reach the telephone by walking against a terrific wind and when asked if he'd be in the movie he gave his answer aloud. It was no.
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